Council to discuss better tsunami alert system

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published August 6, 2006 at 9:00 PM PDT

This story was published more than 18 years ago.

San Diego city council will consider the mayor's response to a grand jury report that recommends better advance warning in the case of a tsunami in San Diego. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

San Diego City Council will consider the mayor's response to a grand jury report that recommends better advance warning in the case of a tsunami in San Diego. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

The grand jury report says San Diego doesn't have adequate maps showing which parts of the region would be inundated in a tsunami, and no community except Coronado has a system of warning sirens.

Jill Olin, head of Homeland Security at the city, says sirens aren't as helpful as you'd think.

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Olin: "Because if you've got the siren, ok was that nuclear and I go underground or was it tsunami and I go above ground, it's not as easy as it used to be with our the air raid sirens and that was our threat and you all knew what to do."

Olin says inundation maps are costly to produce and in the event of a tsunami, the public doesn't need a map to show them where to head for higher ground. However she says the city has recently hired an evacuation planner with money from the Federal Homeland Security grant. Alison St John, KPBS News.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.